A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

On a cold boat, Sally is warmed by her fire, the sound of her neighbours, and the cathartic practice of “speaking in tongues”, a technique she  learned as a very young child from her aunt, who ran an all-female Christian charismatic group and would suddenly launch into these emotional outbursts. She reflects on how this practice may express the longings of the subconscious, and may have influenced her writing. Then she corrects the proofs of her next book, The Green Lady, the third in her series of “coming-of-age” memoirs, or anti-memoirs.   Further Reading Sally’s first book in her cycle of childhood memoirs (she prefers the term “anti-memoirs”) is Girl With Dove, in which we are introduced to her granny, her mother, and her aunt, who brought the practice of “speaking in tongues” to the family. The book can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-Dove-Life-Built-Books/dp/0008226857 Sally’s cycle of books, Girl With Dove, No Boys Play Here, and the forthcoming The Green Lady, form a coming-of-age narrative. Coming-of-age stories, which usually follow the narrator from childhood or teenage years to adulthood, form a very significant branch of literature, with examples including Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, many of Charles Dickens’ novels (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Emma by Jane Austen, The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is a practice in which people utter words or sounds, often thought by believers to be languages unknown to the speaker. It’s seen as a divine language and sign of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; a practice going back to the apostles at Pentecost, as related in the Acts of the Apostles. It’s a prominent feature of worship by Pentecostal and charistmatic Christian groups, such as the one run by Sally’s aunt. Catharsis, used in this sense for the first time by Aristotle, is the purification and purgation of emotions through tragedy, or any extreme emotional state that results in release, renewal and restoration. It can also be related to the idea of expressing buried trauma, thereby easing the burden. Genius Loci was a phrase originally used by the Romans to denote a literal “spirit of place”, a presiding divinity who inhabited a site and gave it meaning. Writers of the 18th century, such as Alexander Pope and Dr Johnson, developed it as the more secular idea that a location has a distinctive and palpable atmosphere; then the Romantic writers developed the quasi-spiritual sense that a place can have profound significance and meaning for us. Perhaps the most influential work in developing this idea is a set of five poems, written by William Wordsworth and included in the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads collection published in 1800, which he grouped under the rubric “Poems on the Naming of Places”. He explained: “Many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents will have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to give some sort of record to such Incidents or renew the gratification of such Feelings, Names have been given to Places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence.” The poems can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads_(1800)/Volume_2/Poems_on_the_Naming_of_Places   The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding and the music is by Simon Turner We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.  

In this podcast, Sally Bayley meets author Alice Jolly to discuss her novel, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, which tells the story of an elderly maidservant in the 19th century. They explore spiritual autobiography, Christina Rossetti, and how literature gives a voice to the marginalized. The podcast also includes reflections on nature, the Stroud Valleys, struggles with expression, and a poem about the bleak midwinter.

The speaker reflects on the power of music in storytelling and reminisces about their mother's love for music. They discuss the significance of hope in writing and explore themes of memory and self-reflection through Nina Simone's performance. The speaker shares cherished memories with their dying friend Philip and wishes him peaceful dreams in his final days.

Reflecting on the importance of quietness and concentration in the creative process, Sally discusses tragic literature and how it can help prepare us for the worst. She shares her own experience with an auto-immune disease and how reading and writing have given her courage. The podcast also explores the role of the boat in enhancing creativity and the pleasure of tragedy in literature.

Sally invites us into her life on the boat, a life lived in close connection to nature, powered by sunlight from her solar panels. We hear how a water pump works, and witness a daddy long legs making its slow way across a rainy porthole. Sally is reading the diaries and journals of Virgina Woolf, a modernist “stream-of-consciousness” writer, who intensively recorded her own thoughts and observations, transforming them into enduring art. Sally responds to the events of the day by writing her own piece of poetic prose, on how we think, and who we really are. Further Reading: Sally talks about a classic short story by Virginia Woolf, The Death of a Moth. In this story, Woolf’s narrator watches the world outside through her window, fascinated by the energy that comes to her from the natural world, “rolling in from the fields and the down beyond … in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings”. She watches a moth crawling across the window, impelled by the same natural energy; but she also realises that the moth is dying. The story was published posthumously, in 1942, the year after Woolf’s death: https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib8/CA01902727/Centricity/Domain/3981/Death%20of%20A%20Moth-Virginia%20Woolf%20copy.pdf Sally also quotes from an essay by Woolf, called On Being Ill, in which Woolf meditates on her changed consciousness and perceptions during her frequent bouts of illness. Woolf thinks about Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous tragic protagonist, who has inspired thousands of books of criticism and analysis which take contradictory positions on what is known as “The Hamlet Problem”: who is Hamlet, and what compels him to act and feel the way he does? It’s one of the most elusive and important questions in all of literature; and it’s a question we can ask about ourselves and others. You can read Woolf's essay, published in 1926, here: https://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf When Sally quotes "To be or not to be", this is of course a reference to Hamlet's third soliloquy, in Act 3, Scene 2, perhaps the most famous line in all of English literature, as Hamlet debates the biggest questions of all; life or death, thinking or acting, becoming or "letting be". Sally also quotes the phrase, "The heart of light, the silence." This is from T.S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece The Waste Land; a spot in time when, in a famously complex poem, Eliot's narrator meets "the hyacinth girl". It's a quintessentially modernist moment, sometimes called an epiphany, when the narrator is transported, transfigured or changed by the vision, which in The Waste Land takes place in the natural world of the "Hyacinth garden". You can read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land To find out more about Sally and her work, please visit: https://sallybayley.com/ The producer is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks also go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Lady Ronia.